Chapter 1. WE HAD OUR DIGNITY

I began this book, oddly enough, because of a story about a man’s long underwear. A Saskatchewan farmer’s wife wrote to Prime Minister Bennett in 1933 asking him to send her husband a new pair of long underwear. His old pair had been patched until there was nothing left to patch, she explained, and he had to have underwear to endure the work on their homestead through the winter. What’s more, if he didn’t get new long johns, , they’d have to leave the land and give up their dream of building the West. Thus, please see the pair on page such-and-such of Eaton’s catalogue, pay for it and send it to us, she asked.

And he did. The Prime Minister of Canada came through with the very pair that she had ordered, all paid for. And who knows, maybe that one pair of long johns kept them going long enough to make a go of it on their farm in the West.

So at least in this instance, it can be said that underwear built the West as much as railways, say, or immigration schemes or wheat. And since no one had written a book on the rise and fall of the trap door, I began hunting up stories about long underwear. They were certainly part of my youth in the Peace River country in the 1940s and 1950s. There was hardly a yard you could drive into without seeing several pairs of men’s underwear flapping on the clothesline or drooping over the back fence. Long johns were often referred to in local history books as well, but it occurred to me one day during my research that articles of female underwear weren’t often mentioned in book or song, and for sure I knew they never showed up on clotheslines in the old days either. Newly washed bras and panties, eg, had to be hung to dry inside a pillowcase or folded up inside towels in order to maintain the family reputation. So that’s when I added corsets and girdles and other horrid harnesses to my underwear research; and that’s when my son suggested that I was studying the unmentionable history of the West.

The word unmentionable led me into other invisible areas: how women learned about sex, how they managed menstruation before the whole subject turned up in living color on television, how they managed their reproductive lives when they couldn’t even say the words, how garters ruined many a date. These things are not mentioned in history books, not even in the local history books that so many communities have published in the last 40 years. They are a wonderful resources, but they leave out so much about the practical personal details of women’s lives.